Yesterday, I spent several hours figuring out if the business requirement for "within the next 3 days" meant 3 calendar days or 72 hours from now. Then about 10 minutes actually writing the code. Everyone thought my efforts were very valuable.
100%. What makes us what we are is the mindset (in this case, this kind of "attention to detail); that didn't change with (first) compilers, (then) scripting languages, or (future?) AI-assisted programming.
PS - Lawyers aren't even as detail-oriented as we are, it's surprising.
Maybe that's true in general because the spread in skill for being able to make a living as a lawyer and the same as a programmer depends far less on that attention to detail being a core skill. Still, I wonder if that also holds at the high levels of the profession. I get the impression that at the FAANG-level, lawyers would compare pretty favorably to programmers in detail orientation. In particular, patent and contract law.
That said, it's just my general impression of what lawyers get up to.
...Hmm, thinking about the contract law thing a bit more. Yeah, I do believe you are right. Lawyers aren't writing nearly as many extremely detail-oriented texts as programmers are on a day-to-day basis. Their jobs are much more around finding, reading, and understanding those things and building stories around them.
